American cryptographer Whitfield Diffie, co-winner of the 2015 Turing Award along with Martin Hellman, will attend this year's China International Big Data Industry Expo, which will be held in Guiyang, Southwest China's Guizhou province, on May 26-29.
Diffie will attend the expo's opening ceremony and several activities, and will also give speeches at a number of high-end forums and dialogues.
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Whitfield Diffie is expected to attend the 2019 Big Data Expo. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] |
Diffie is the chief scientist at Cryptic Labs and considered the "father of modern cryptography". He originally put forward the concept of public-key cryptography and created the "Diffie–Hellman key exchange", which serves as the basis for the modern public cryptosystem widely used in online communication.
In 1976, Diffie and Hellman published a book on this concept entitled New Directions in Cryptography. The book introduces a new way to solve key distribution, a fundamental issue in cryptography.
In 1998, Diffie co-wrote Privacy on the Line with Susan Landau, and an updated and expanded edition was published in 2007. They discuss the social function of privacy, how it underlies a democratic society, and what will happen when it is lost.
The Cold War proved that telecommunications are not always safe. Diffie and Landau suggested that measures be taken to protect privacy, as communication systems are needed more now than at any other time in history.
The Big Data Expo is an annual international event established in 2015. As a high-end professional platform, the 2019 expo will focus on presenting the latest technological innovations and achievements in big data.
American economist Paul Romer, co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics along with William Nordhaus, has also been invited to the 2019 expo.
Diffie's major awards and honors:
1996: NIST/NSA National Computer Systems Security Award
1997: Franklin Institute’s Louis E. Levy Medal and ACMKannellakis Award
1998: Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from IEEE Information Theory Society
1999: IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award
2004: IACR Fellow
2010: IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
2011: Fellow of the Computer History Museum
2016: Turing Award, widely considered the “Nobel Prize” in computer science
